Comfort crew sees rare cases

About 120 children, including infants, are on board the Navy ship

Fritzca, an 18-month-old girl, lost her right arm in the Haiti earthquake. She is with her father and Cmdr. Dave Oravec of Frederick, a chaplain on the USNS Comfort on Sunday.

ABOARD THE USNS COMFORT  When he wants to take a break, Chief Petty Officer Mike Davenport picks up a stethoscope.

The 37-year-old respiratory therapist from Frederick, in charge of about 90 medical personnel on the USNS Comfort hospital ship off Port-au-Prince, has been on board for a week, trying to keep his staff together and make them work effectively as a team. He regularly works 14- and 16-hour days, and for down time, he still wants to help.

"I take advantage of the opportunity to practice respiratory therapy whenever I can," said Davenport, a father of four children and the husband of another respiratory therapist at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, where most of the ship's personnel are based.

Davenport, who is assigned to the Comfort but also works at Frederick Memorial Hospital, compared the first week of the Comfort's medical mission to "putting a puzzle together."

As of Tuesday afternoon, that puzzle included just over 360 patients on board, down from 375 on Sunday. On Monday, the Comfort took on 62 patients and discharged about 40. Some burn victims were being evacuated to the University of Miami Hospital.

The 62nd patient to come on board late Monday was a baby boy born the day before the Jan. 12 earthquake.

A cluster of doctors bunched around the boy's bed in the casualty receiving area, while his 22-year-old mother looked on. The baby's yelps of pain punctuated the somber atmosphere of the pediatrics bay.

The boy's father died in the earthquake. The baby stayed with his mother in the street. The woman could produce very little milk, and her baby was severely dehydrated by the time he was aboard the Comfort.

"I would say within about a day or so, he would have died," said Kensington's Capt. Daniel Shmorhun, one of the doctors attending the child.

To help solve the problem, Shmorhun said, lactating members of Comfort's crew are pumping breast milk that will be stored for the babies on board to drink. A supply of breast milk from the United States is also supposed to be brought in soon.

"We're creating a breast-milk bank," Shmorhun said.

About 120 children were on board the ship as of Tuesday morning, according to Shmorhun, roughly a third of the patients on board.

Some of the cases are things medical personnel rarely or never encounter. One small boy suffered a leakage of cerebrospinal fluid out of one ear during the earthquake, and through a combination of heat, time and humidity, fungus crept up to the source of the fluid before he was rescued. The child had mold in his brain.

The medication the doctors would prefer to try to help with his condition was in the United States, said Alayna Schwartz, a perioperative nurse from Germantown. The child also ripped out IV needles.

"I don't know if we can fix this kid. We can't fix this kid," Schwartz said, taking a break to eat a hamburger Monday afternoon.

One patient was initially going into the OR for an amputation just above his left ankle. Doctors discovered that there was dead tissue and gangrene up to mid-thigh.

"That's where the maggots come in," Schwartz said, explaining that larvae had been found in the leg.

Most of the leg was removed.

Schwartz worked the 6:30 p.m. to midnight shift Sunday. She said she was determined not to break down.

It isn't just patient care that increases stress for personnel on the Comfort. Davenport missed his youngest son Jaiden's third birthday Thursday. When he talked to Jaiden on the phone, his son asked: "Daddy, are you fixing boo-boos?"

Since he can't be at home with his wife and children, the stethoscope and his patients are his "release," as the hospital continues to settle into its role in helping a shattered nation.

"The flow seems to be smoothing out a little bit," Davenport said. "I think it's getting a lot better."